1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to apparatuses and methods for reading content data from a database and outputting the content data to provide the content data to a user, the database storing various types of content data, for example, visual data such as image, video, text, or light, audio data such as music, speech, or sound, smell data such as perfume, tactile data such as vibration, or multimodal data including a combination of these types of data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Past data, particularly, data owned by an individual person, includes various types of data, such as images taken by the person with a camera, video taken or recorded by the person with a video camera or a video tape recorder, e-mails sent or received by the person with a cellular phone or a personal computer, music purchased by the person, voice uttered by the person with a cellular phone, or sound recorded by the person.
Past data owned by an individual person is often related to meaningful memories, so that playback of past data sometimes recollects emotion in the past and causes a sense of nostalgia. The reminiscence therapy is known as a method of psychotherapy based on memories of events, such as memories relating to past data. The reminiscence therapy is said to be effective for clarification of self-identity, improvement in emotional and behavioral aspects, and formation of interpersonal relationships.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 11-291663 discloses techniques regarding an image album. According to the techniques, past images are used to affect human feeling directly so that the sense of pleasure or the sense of nostalgia will be increased. Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-136820 discloses techniques regarding a data-accumulating conversation device. According to the techniques, conversation data is stored with ranks based on the significance or frequency of words, and past conversation data with high ranks are inserted in intervals of conversation, so that it is possible to enjoy natural conversation while recollecting past conversation.